Daily Archive for June 23rd, 2011

I get a lot of email from headhunters. Apparently the tech job market is kinda hot. I ignore 99.9% of all the emails, because most of them are from headhunters I call keyword monkeys. They spam their templated emails to everyone their semi-automatic search bot keyword matches no matter how irrelevant that job may be to the potential candidate’s experience and skills.

For example I regularly receive job “opportunities” for ATG Dynamo and ColdFusion jobs. The problem is the last time I did any work with those technologies is more than 10 years ago. I wouldn’t know a .jhtml page from .cfm page these days.

Anyway, today one of those keyword monkeys sent me an email that had these words in it:

This is a Senior role.Resource needs to be able to work independently and be completely immersed in the building blocks of an ecommerce web site.

Totally awesome!

I’m going to, for the moment, ignore the fact that the position was for a business analyst, which if you took even a quick glance at my resume, is as far from my actual skills as you can get.

Instead I’d like to give this keyword monkey, and all headhunters of his ilk, a bit of free advice.

If you want quality candidates, PLEASE, for your sake, try to fucking treat your prospects as human beings and not just as “resources”. That means you should NOT send templated emails. I junk those faster than employers/headhunters junk uninteresting resumes. Please try to convey that you’ve spent at least a little bit of time familiarizing yourself with who I am and what I can do (as much as you can do that by looking at one’s resume/experience). Mention where you found me (a database of 10-year-old resumes is NOT a good place to do that). And do try to communicate why do you think I’d make a good candidate. It’d save your time, and mine.

Maybe, if you keyword monkeys followed that advice, I wouldn’t be receiving job opportunities for jr. system administrators, senior Perl programmers, ColdFusion developers, ATG Dynamo business analysts or Tibco consultants.